The 1906 Meeting of the American Medical Association
In 1906, the American Medical Association held its annual meeting in Boston. Since its formation in 1847, the AMA had only met in the city twice, and Boston had not hosted the meeting in over forty years. Although there was doubt on the part of President Eliot that the Longwood buildings would be ready for the meeting of the American Medical Association in June 1906, as this letter of J. Collins Warren attests, the architects affirmed that, within a year, "something will be finished … so we are going ahead. We have had good weather & much progress is being made & I have taken many individual members of the Faculty out to the buildings, so now our long period of incubation seems coming to a close.". The plan to unveil the new Medical School campus at the meeting went forward, and the Longwood facility was the site of scientific and social events during the AMA meeting in June. The Harvard Graduates' Magazine called this "the very best possible opportunity for calling the attention of medical men all over the country to the beautiful new buildings of the Medical School and to the extensive facilities afforded by them for laboratory work."
Over 3,600 members registered for the meeting. A number of distinguished foreign visitors were also in attendance, including Dr. Richard A. Reeve, president of the British Medical Association, Sir William Macewen of the University of Glasgow, and Professor Friedrich Trendelenburg, of the University of Leipzig. President Eliot summarized the effect the buildings produced on the assembled crowd: "The great throng of interested persons found them spacious, handsome, well-set and of noble aspect. They were pronounced good, not only for our School, but for the cause of medical education and progress in general…. In every sense of the word it is a monumental success."
A few weeks before the AMA meeting, an editorial printed in The St. Paul Medical Journal, stated:
When these buildings are finished the equipment for medical teaching at Harvard will be, beyond question, the first in the world, and we also believe that it would be difficult to find in any one medical school in any country a larger number of brilliant medical teachers or better clinical facilities for both undergraduate and post-graduate work …. It is not enough that a medical education teaches the student how to recognize and how to treat disease; there should also be instilled into his mind, so that it becomes a part of his very being, the love of truth and of charity and of human kindness, and above all a high appreciation of the honor of his profession, so that he will need no written code of ethics in order to live rightly his professional life. These things he imbibes rather by association than by the spoken word of his teachers, and these things Harvard has always stood for and always will.